I got caught up on the first 3 episodes I had on DVR this week. I’m so glad this show is back. I don’t know how “bold” of a statement this is but in the modern era this is the best sci-fi show I’ve ever seen. I was a big fan of BSG, accepted that there were those filler episodes, and even though I didn’t care for the direction the overall story took it still was an excellent show. The Expanse (in my opinion) just blows it away… so far. Some comments on first 3 episodes:
[ul]
[li]I’ve never found Bobbi to be that sexy. I mean, as an actress she is very attractive but in this role she hasn’t really quite tickled the fancy. Until I saw her in her power armor. Perhaps that says more about me than anything.[/li][li]The Razorback was not what I had in mind from reading the books but now that I saw it on t.v., it really could not have been better. In my mind from the books, I imagined a MUCH more narrow ship and a far more cramped interior. I realize now that my mental picture really wasn’t logical but the show really nailed a “racing ship” perfectly.[/li][li]I wish Avasarala was my grandmother. Not my mother though, I’d probably be completely damaged emotionally. But she would be a kick-ass grandmother to have in your life. She continues to be my favorite on this show.[/li][li]I don’t disagree with some of the questions about the rail gun/time/distance arguments in this thread. To be honest, my interpretation of the scene was these were stealth weapon platforms that Mars had managed to position to a close proximity to Earth. It wasn’t that they were out near Mars. Maybe I mis-understood but it is just such a minor quibble to me that I’m not really concerned. [/li][/ul]
Except that the hologram speaks for itself. (Well, I don’t think it actually speaks, but you can look at it and see that the ships are positioned at different points of Mars’ orbital radius for some reason.)
Yeah, that bothered me too, and I tried doing a mental “edit” after the shots were away, pretending there was a time jump, but there wasn’t. The fact that they had real time communication with the rail guns, that had to have been at least more than a few light seconds, and probably several minutes, away was a bit “off” as well.
It’s a small nitpick, and the Expanse hasn’t had too many of them (the Jupiter Moons tour in the last season being a big one), but it does pull me out of it for a moment when I see the laws of physics broken that badly.
Remember: what we’re seeing is a representation/adaptation of the true events of the Great Solar System War as it really happened out there in the multiverse; in reality, I’m sure that there was a whole lot more waiting around and picking noses in the war room than in episode 3 of season 3, but the representation accelerated it for dramatic purposes. They still probably could have done it with cuts and shots of impatient bureaucrats, but oh well.
I find canon and fiction inconsistencies a lot easier to handle if I pretend that every story really happened somewhere out there in the multiverse, and Earth writers and producers are just doing their best to adapt it, sometimes making mistakes. Even for big literary series like GRRM’s – the story of ASOIAF came to him through the magic of the multiverse seeping into the minds of writers, but sometimes he bungles the adaptation of what really happened on the page. It makes it easy to fanwank/retcon in my head that everything actually makes sense, it was just a budget/writing/directing mistake.
Just for gits and shiggles, plugging in the 3 km/s speed for modern test rail guns (which is 1/100,000th the speed of light) plugging in the numbers from my earlier post (traveling at 28x the speed of light for 45 seconds) those rounds would take almost exactly 4 years to reach the target.
I would think that they would have at least a magnitude increase on that, maybe two. It would not be all that surprising if they could reach reasonable fractions of the speed of light.
I need to watch the earlier scenes again. I thought the dialog explained the platforms and their locations which had through stealth tech managed to position themselves close to Earth. Again, I may likely not remember that correctly. At the end of the day, it’s not even a hill I want to die upon. It’s just not that important to me but I get the questions about it.
Yeah, it’s just one of those things that we have to accept when it comes to TV vs. books. In the books, it’s a major plot point that travel takes time; day, weeks or even months to get where you’re going. Meanwhile, communications are at light speed. It’s like the late 1800s on Earth, with telegraphs making communication almost immediate, but you were still stuck with sail or steam ships to get anywhere. You could know that there was problem, and send someone out to try to fix it, but in the meantime, events on the ground kept evolving, and by the time you get there, you might be facing a completely different problem.
That works in a book, but in a TV show, I suspect most watchers would get bored and/or confused by the whole issue.
Yeah, there’s no FTL commo. They had to deal with light-speed delay a couple times. When the martians faced off with a UN ship heading for Phoebe and ended up firing on and destroying the moon. UN command had to trust the local commander due to com delay. Also when Avasarala was saying goodbye to her husband and there was a 2 second delay due to the distance between Earth and Luna.
I really don’t get Naomi’s reasoning. She had a kid, therefore she gives an uncontrollable, world killing, alien weapon to a militant organization. Maybe I need to watch it again.
I get that she thinks that it will just be used for political leverage but how can she be that naive?
I really don’t care what Naomi’s reasoning is. She has made the problem worse. She sucks and I hate her.
Well shit. But it does seem they are shopping it around to other outlets:
The ratings were pretty poor and the sets looked fairly costly. And apparently SyFy didn’t have streaming rights for it. I think it’s currently streaming on Amazon Prime? So maybe approach them first on it?
I admit it is a bit hard to get into at the beginning but it definitely grows on you. The more realistic physics of space travel also takes a bit of getting used to rather than the Star Wars/Star Trek model but it ultimately adds a lot of tension to space battled (e.g. loose shit in the ship can become lethal during extreme maneuvers).
The protomolecule is an interesting foe too.
It’s a really good show with interesting characters and story and I will miss it.
